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What's the difference between a CTO and a vice-president of engineering (VPoE)? According to Jason Hoffman and Bryan Cantrill of Joyent, the lines are blurry. At the Monki Gras conference in London on February 1st, Hoffman (CTO) and Cantrill (VPoE), shared the stage and talked about the differences in their roles.

In keeping with the generally boisterous nature of Monki Gras, the conversation with Hoffman and Cantrill was a bit more bare-knuckle than your average conference presentation. Perhaps it's a result of their joint suffering under Sun Microsystems' "Somali warlord style of management" (as Hoffman put it).

Lots of memories of my computing past flooding through me this morning, and no, this won't be another Jobs tribute. But a post yesterday talking about whether you were using the Internet back in 1995 brought me back to that era, and I thought it would be a good time to show how much progress we have made in the 16-some years and what businesses were doing with the Internet back then.

Certainly the theory that Oracle had no plans for Sun Microsystems following its acquisition, has been completely deflated. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison always wanted to be able to deliver database devices that come pre-configured, and Sun has given him the resources to deliver it. But besides a guest appearance by the manager of the San Francisco Giants and a rock-blasting video of the America's Cup race, last Sunday night's keynote at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco mostly featured Ellison pacing back and forth on stage reciting performance numbers.

Larry Ellison completed Oracle's purchase of Sun this week. Now he is making it clear he wants a professional basketball team.

There have been rumors for months that Ellison wanted to purchase the beleaguered Golden State Warriors, a National Basketball Association team out of the San Francisco Bay area.

The U.S. Department of Justice may have approved the purchase of Sun Microsystems by Oracle, but the deal still could be delayed by yet another institution. The Brussels-based European Commission still has 48 hours to open an in-depth investigation, reports Reuters, and the DOJ's European counterparts are looking much more closely at Oracle owning MySQL.

Is a leading enterprise vendor buying out its open source competition a violation of antitrust laws? In its approval the U.S. authorities cited no concern about MySQL, and focused largely on Java licensing issues. Sun's shareholders voted to go ahead with the multi-billion dollar deal back in July, when it was still under scrutiny from the DOJ.

As of July 22nd, all MySQL.com Web services have become completely inaccessible. Just in time for OSCON, the failure leaves all six million or more users of the open source database system unable to access source code, bug tracking, or discussion forums on the site.

According to Duleepa "Dups" Wijayawardhana of Sun Microsystem's MySQL Community Team, the problem was the result of a massive power outage in Uppsala, Sweden, where the infrastructure is located.

As of today, the shareholders of Sun Microsystems have approved the merger with Oracle at a meeting at Sun's offices in Santa Clara, California. Announced on April 20th, Sun will be bought for $9.50 a share in cash, a grand total of $7.4 billion.

Thus far, the merger has encountered some bumps in the road. Despite confident statements from Oracle predicting the closure of the deal this summer, an antitrust investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice is underway. The DOJ extended the window for looking in to the company past the usual 30-day limit.

Oracle is buying Sun, and bankers are looking forward to the next wave of consolidation. To somebody who remembers the innovation and excitement of earlier enterprise hardware and software start-ups, this is a bit gloomy. CHOI (Cisco, HP, Oracle, IBM) does not spell "choice" for buyers, employees, or investors. Choose your behemoth. If consolidation means lower prices -- and it will -- buyers will be happy. But, it all sounds like cost-cutting, layoffs, and less innovation to me.